Why iCloud will be one of the most important products for Steve Jobs’ legacy

“Steve Jobs introduced a lot of important products to the world, including the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad,” Sean Ludwig reports for VentureBeat. “One of the final products he brought forth before his death was iCloud, a storage drive for your life.”

Although it’s just getting off the ground this month, it might be one of the most important things Jobs ever helped produce in his long career,” Ludwig reports. “iCloud, alongside the iOS 5 operating system, was the last product Jobs showed off back in July at the Worldwide Developers Conference. At that time, Jobs said, ‘We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device. We’re going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.’ The iCloud software would act as a storage solution for your media as well as a bridge that connects all your devices for purchased media and personal photos and videos.”

Ludwig reports, “iCloud went public Oct. 12, and while it may have been overshadowed by the iOS 5 release the same day, its impact will be much more substantial over time.”

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I’m a total convert to iCloud. It just works. You just have to set it up right once and it syncs everything on your devices in the background without you even needing to lift a finger. In this it surpasses Google’s cloud and has leapfrogged Google in a single generational leap. You can ditch Google mail, docs, calendar and contacts and opt for iCloud. iCloud will push data to your devices in the background. The best part of it is it works instantaneously. There’s literally no lag or wait state for changes to be propagated. When you send mail, a copy is instantly made available in your iPhone or iPad’s sent folder. You don’t have to wait for wireless sync over the air unlike Google mail to see your mail appear in the appropriate folder.

By moving reliance away from Google services, Apple is removing a source of advertisement driven revenue for Google that depends on selling user generated data to advertisers. I use iCloud all the time and can’t live without it now.

if you nominate your Mac as the primary backup option and then back that up on Time Machine, you will not lose data even if iCloud goes offline. The most that will happen is you’ll lose sync. This is because the data resides in your Mac, and Time Machine backup, not on Apple’s servers. iCloud acts like push syncing rather than pull syncing in which data is pulled to a central server and stored there. There is an option for you to nominate iCloud as your primary backup but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. This is what differentiates Apple from Google. Your data belongs to you.

1. This is a difficult concept for many people to grasp. Steve Jobs said it at the iCloud introduction: it is not some iDisk in the sky. The data is always on the devices. He knew that requiring an Internet connection to access your stuff is a terrible scenario for almost everyone, but the push system is beautiful. The data goes to the cloud and gets pushed to all your devices. I heard him from day 1 and thought that this is the BEST cloud concept by far.

iCloud has more features than MobileMe? Give me a break! Sorry, but this article strikes me as pure pie-in-the-sky speculation. Not only does iCloud lack MobileMe’s most useful features (photo galleries, iDisk storage and filesharing, and iWeb publishing), it also depends on broadband networks Apple doesn’t control and which are clearly incapable of supporting the huge increase in network activity that iCloud will create.

You’re barking up the wrong tree here. Drink your Kool-Aid and “Think Different” like the rest of the minions here who can’t seem to recall Syncing of Keychains, System Preferences, iWeb, Galleries, ever existed. Oh, and the one I love best – It workes as good as MobileMe (which is being cancelled because it was a massive failure, just like .Mac and iTools before). iCloud now only syncs documents and photos …. whether you want them all synced or not, that’s obviously soo much better.